Last week, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen lauded abortion-rights demonstrators who held rallies exterior statehouses and different websites throughout the nation on May 21.

“We’re not going to go back in time to a time before Roe, when thousands of women died every year because they didn’t have access to essential health care,” Wen mentioned.

I, too, am pretty assured that the Supreme Court gained’t condemn girls to a dystopian epidemic of abortion-related deaths. But that’s as a result of I’m pretty assured that only a few girls will die from unlawful abortions even when Roe v. Wade is overturned.

In 1972, the yr earlier than Roe was handed down, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 girls within the United States died of unlawful abortions — solely 15 extra deaths than have been reported from authorized abortions. And physicians’ means to deal with surgical issues has improved significantly because the early 1970s.

There was a time when hundreds of American girls died from abortions yearly. That time was earlier than the invention of antibiotics. By 1945, nonetheless pretty early within the antibiotic revolution, the most effective estimates point out that ladies’s demise charge from abortions had fallen into the lots of, together with deaths from authorized therapeutic abortions. It had declined into the double-digits even earlier than the process turned broadly authorized. So should you’re apprehensive about girls dying from unintended pregnancies, antibiotic resistance most likely poses a graver menace than outlawing abortion.

That commentary could seem to be a sneaky try to undermine the battle for abortion rights. It’s truly a sneaky try to strive to get pro-choicers to apply just a bit of their ferocious vitality to a fair greater downside, one which threatens not simply reproductive health, but in addition nonreproductive health, in addition to the entire sexual revolution.

That’s not hyperbole, or not a lot, anyway. Just a few years in the past, economist Andrew Francis identified one thing odd: American sexual conduct appears to have begun altering within the late 1950s, effectively earlier than the arrival of the contraceptive tablet, which has been usually credited with jump-starting the sexual revolution. Francis’ rationalization: the invention of antibiotics that might remedy syphilis.

Consider that in 1939, nearly 20,000 Americans died from syphilis, greater than the very best estimates for unlawful abortions throughout that interval. And it wasn’t a fairly approach to die.

It’s unlikely that curing syphilis alone prompted the sexual revolution. But the same old suspects, contraception and tradition, may not have mattered a lot if the nastiest of sexually transmitted illnesses hadn’t been tamed — and if the hazard of an infection from abortion hadn’t been radically lowered.

That medical progress will stall, and finally reverse, if antibiotic resistance continues to enhance. As it does, micro organism after micro organism, yr after yr. Eventually, there’s an actual threat that micro organism, not the Supreme Court, could convey about the world promised by each National Abortion Rights Action League pamphlets and Victorian novels: one the place demise stalks the sexually liberated girl.

Today, probably the most prevalent sexually transmitted illnesses are usually treatable, or a minimum of manageable, and abortion stays a protected process. But the menace is rising as profligate misuse of antibiotics encourages micro organism to evolve resistance, and international journey spreads these superbugs far and extensive.

Syphilis hasn’t but developed resistance to penicillin, however extraordinarily drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea are already right here. It can’t be assumed that syphilis and chlamydia won’t ever comply with, together with micro organism that used to routinely kill surgical sufferers — together with girls who had abortions — with secondary infections.

The finest time to sort out such a critical menace is when it’s nonetheless small, however rising. That time is now. Better international coordination of infectious illness protocols is important, together with stronger help for public-health efforts in creating nations and much better incentives for pharmaceutical firms to develop new antibiotics to substitute these which are fading away.

Unfortunately, as antibiotic coverage researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan as soon as informed me, it might be onerous to stir public curiosity till “a lot of antibiotics have failed.”

The historic response to different crises means that he’s proper. But if we ladies may muster one-tenth as a lot ardour about drug resistance as we pour into abortion rights, I’d guess we may show him fallacious. And show Leana Wen proper that we’re not going again to such a world.